Girls just wanna have fundamental representation in government

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PHOTO: An Afghan parliament member (L) votes on a list of cabinet nominees at the parliament house in Kabul, January 16, 2010. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

It’s International Women’s Day, but hold the confetti. More than a century after the first Women’s Day celebrationâ€”a socialist proposal inaugurated in 1909â€”fewer than one in five parliamentarians worldwide are women.

Acknowledging the inequality, many countries have implemented voluntary or mandatory minimums for the percentage of women in government. Such quotas are supported by a wealth of leaders, including U.N. Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet, who has said she â€ś[encourages] countries to use quotas to expand womenâ€™s participation in parliament.â€ť

Yet gender mandates have their detractors, who say the idea of reserving seats for women is ineffective at best and undemocratic at worst. One criticism holds that quotas delegitimize female politicians, who are seen as not having “earned” their positions. In some countries, women serve in government as puppets for their husbands, and in others female politicians with limited powers are seen as little more than window dressing.

What follows is a handful of national case studies, quick looks at where womenâ€™s representation – and particularly their meaningful participation – has increased or not. For more on quotas,Â this handy map outlines which countries reserve seats or legislate quotas for women.

UNITED STATES: American exceptionalism makes exception for women
For all the attention paid to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the United States remains decidedly mediocre when it comes to female representation in politics, ranking 77th in the world by percentage of legislative seats held by women. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of national parliaments, approximately 17.8 percent of the House of Representatives are women, as well as 20 percent of the Senate. In total, there have been just 39 female senators in the nationâ€™s history, and 20 of them are currently serving. The U.S. does not employ quotas to encourage or mandate female participation in government or corporate America, but remains obsessed with Michelle Obamaâ€™s bangs.

UNITED KINGDOM: Beyond the Queen Mum
Prime Minister David Cameronâ€™s pre-election pledge that one third of the UKâ€™s ministerial jobs would be taken by women by before 2015Â hasn’tÂ exactly come true. In reality, just four of the UKâ€™s 23 cabinet positions are currently held by women, down from five before a 2012 reshuffling. Gender equality is on better display in Parliament, where one in five members (22 percent in both the House of Commons and House of Lords) are female. Although the UK has made progressâ€”prior to 1987, women never made up more than 5 percent of Parliamentâ€”critics say they have a ways to go: The country ranks only fifteenth out of 27 EU member states in its portion of female members of Parliament,Â according to a March 2013 report issued by the government.

SOUTH AFRICA: A quota success story
A dramatic example of gender quotas in action, South Africa currently ranks eighth in the world by percentage of legislative seats held by women,Â according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Thatâ€™s up from a ranking of 141st back in 1994, when the African National Congress first instituted a quota system reserving 30 percent of parliamentary candidacies for women. Currently, 42.3 percent of South Africaâ€™s 400-person National Assembly are women, as well as 32.1 percent of the 54 permanent seats in the National Council of Provinces. But all is not well in gender politics: The country is still struggling with its apartheid past, as well as disconcerting statistics on rape. The Medical Research Council of South Africa estimates that up to 3,600 rapes happen daily in the country of nearly 52 million, and more than one-third of South African men admitted to rape in aÂ government survey.

NORWAY: The gender balance trendsetter
With an enviable 46 weeks of paid maternity leave, Norway is notoriously female-friendly (it was also the first country to introduce paternity leave). Although the country has no legal provisions for gender balance in government, Norwayâ€™s Socialist Left party first introduced a voluntary gender quotaâ€”aiming for a 40 percent minimum on female candidatesâ€”in 1975, and other parties have followed suit.Â In 2004, Parliament even passed a law requiring publicly owned companies to have at least 40 percent women on their boards of directors. Today,Â 39.6 percent of Norwayâ€™s 169-member Parliament are women.

AFGHANISTAN: Shaky gains at a crossroads before 2014
Recent improvements inÂ womenâ€™s freedom could come under attack after the United States withdraws from Afghanistan in 2014. Since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, the country’s parliament has implemented quotas that ensure female candidates receiveÂ a little over a quarterÂ of parliamentary seats. Despite unclear rules on implementation, the system â€śhas played a vital role in maintaining a significant presence of women in both parliament and [provincial councils],â€ť according to a report by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent research organization. Yet trouble is brewing, beginning with a decree by President Hamid KarzaiÂ in 2010 that a man could take a womanâ€™s seat if it were vacated, opening the door to intimidation attempts.Â Under Taliban rule, Afghan women were forbidden to leave the house without a male relativeâ€™s accompaniment.

IRAQ: Running for office because my husband told me to
Just becauseÂ you’veÂ got the numbers doesn’t meanÂ you’veÂ got the clout. The Iraqi Constitution mandates that women fill 25 percent of seats in parliament. Yet while women are much better integrated professionally in Iraq than Afghanistan, the quota system also serves as a good case study in how filling quota requirements may fail to benefit women. The New York Timesnoted that Iraqi women had â€śless political influence” after the 2010 election “than at any time since the American invasion.” Moreover, a womanâ€™s candidacy may serve as a thinly-veiled bid for office by her husband or brother. As Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out, â€śMany of the women on party lists [in the 2010 elections] were relatives of politicians or from prominent families.” Once in office, women may be relegated to insignificant ministries and still be subservient to male party leaders.

RUSSIA: Putin fights tigers, jails women
Observed since 1913 in Russia, International Womenâ€™s Day is still widely celebrated there, despite the fact that just 74 of the countryâ€™s 613-member Parliament are women. Of course, one of those women is Valentina Matvienko, the first female chairperson of the Federation Council of Russia (the upper chamber of Parliament) and arguably the third-most important person in the country after President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. But Russia has a ways to go on gender equality: The United Nations has pegged the countryâ€™s male/female wage gap at over 30 percent, and Putinâ€™s jailing of all-female punk band Pussy Riot was seen as indicative of the countryâ€™s limited political freedoms.

RWANDA: Women dominate parliament
If you had to guess the worldâ€™s only government where women are the majority, Rwanda might not come to mind. Yet following a genocide that left aÂ 70-percent-femaleÂ population and quotas guaranteeing women 30 percent of posts in decision-making bodies, women surpassed the minimum to make up 56 percentÂ of Rwanda’s current parliament. Greater representation in parliament has meant women were able to pass legislation on gender issues, including abolishing patriarchal laws.

And what about men’s rights: Men’s equal rights are challenged by unfair child support obligations, a family law system that privileges mothers in child custody cases, the trivialization of female-on-male domestic violence, the cultural vilification of male sexuality, and social customs that impose an outdated (and crippling) expectation of masculinity on men.

In a democracy, the people elect who they want in a position. If you start having ethnic or gender quotas, it stops being a democracy and becomes something much more dangerous, a partial birthright. Every law there is that guarantees something to one gender effectively is a ban on the other. Gender equality can only be earned in the peoples minds, not legislated into existence.

Sexism is alive and well. While it is true there are places where women suffer true injustice this article ignores the reality that in many places it is a woman’s world. It ignores that in those same places many MEN suffer injustices as well. It ignores the ridicule and blatant sexism that drives western media and advertising. It ignores how, especially in the west that fathers, men are below second class citizens in many workplaces and legal realities. It ignores the reality that males are ignored and under-reportred as victims of domestic violence. Look at all the women now in executive positions. Yet, in the interest of equal jobs, where are the women garbage collectors, coal miners, and other jobs lacking in glamour and power? Sorry this is an old song that is tired and over-played. When will we actually seek to treat all people with equal respect and stop hiding behind gender, race and religious labels?

All of Norway has a population a bit shy of metropolitan Philadelphia, and it a trendsetter only in the minds of feminists. But, it is remarkably honest, for a change, for this bunch to openly declare their opposition to democracy on anything but their terms. It would be fun and interesting for the Democrat party in the U.S. to embrace that as part of their agenda. For the 15 minutes they last after doing so.